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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn --
Even Bed-Stuy

Updated Aug. 25, 2000 12:01 a.m. ET

T hink of this as a tale of two trees -- two city trees. Though both trees are Brooklyn trees, one is in the well-groomed Heights, a world away from the other, in Bedford Stuyvesant, among the most scruffy of New York's neighborhoods.

The first tree is half a block -- a ginkgo's whiff away -- from the building in which I live. It is a 50-foot Dawn Redwood, a genus -- Metasequoia glyptostroboides -- once believed to have died out, until living specimens were found in China in 1945. Seeds were brought back to America by the...